Just days after Google moved its search business out of mainland China, some journalists have discovered they have had their Yahoo mail accounts tampered with.

According to Reuters, Andrew Jacobs of the New York Times in Beijing had his Yahoo account mail set to forward to another address and Kathleen McLaughlin, a freelance journalist in Beijing, was unable to acess her account. Yahoo refused to confirm how the accounts were breached and whether they were part of a broader issue or just isolated incidents.

"Yahoo! condemns all cyber attacks regardless of origin or purpose," spokeswoman Dana Lengkeek told Reuters news agency. "We are committed to protecting user security and privacy and we take appropriate action in the event of any kind of breach."

Human rights activists and journalists who report on activities in China discovered their accounts had been tampered with in early January this year. Google revealed that in mid-December 2009, they, along with a number of other large companies in the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors, were targeted in a sophisticated cyber-attack. This attack on their infrastructure originated in China, and resulted in the theft of intellectual property. As a result of the attacks Google announced it would stop censoring search results in China and forwarded its Google.cn domain to Hong Kong earlier this month.